Patient Portals (and other IT projects) Benefit from a Clean MPI
ExecutiveInsight posted an article today that highlights another healthcare IT project impacted by the quality of data within the Master Patient Index: the Patient Portal. As solutions are rolled out to enable patients to participate in the management of their care, the Patient Portal offers multiple exciting opportunities, as demonstrated by the university medical center profiled in the article.
But as the authors indicate, one dimension of the success and reach of the project correlates to the organization’s ability to identify its patients and all of their data. If a patient has duplicate records or multiple identifiers across the enterprise, the portal may not present to the patient a complete or up to date profile of healthcare information. This scenario limits the utility of the portal and impacts the patient experience.
However, an enterprise master patient index (EMPI) with a well-tuned matching algorithm will discover enterprise data related to a patient, and aggregate the information under a single, unique enterprise identifier, increasing the value of the Patient Portal for everyone involved.
And the beauty of this approach is that other IT projects can also benefit from the single patient identifier assigned as a result of the matching and indexing features of the EMPI.
You can read the article here.
